When a campaign underperforms, the first instinct is to rewrite the ads or change the targeting. In about a third of the accounts we audit, the real problem sits one click later: a landing page that takes four or five seconds to become usable on a phone.
Paid traffic is impatient. People who click an ad haven't chosen your brand yet, they're testing it. If the page stalls, they go back and click the next result, and you've still paid for the visit.
What we measure first
- Largest Contentful Paint on a mid-range Android phone over 4G, not on a developer laptop.
- Time until the form works. A form that renders but can't be typed into is worse than a blank page.
- Third-party scripts. Chat widgets, heatmaps and old pixels often add more weight than the page itself.
The usual fixes
Most improvements are unglamorous. We resize and compress hero images, remove tracking tags nobody uses, load fonts properly, and move the form above the fold on mobile. None of it requires a redesign.
On one client account, removing three unused scripts cut load time by 1.8 seconds and lowered cost per lead by 22% in the following month.
Make it part of the launch checklist
Speed regressions creep back in every time someone adds a new widget. That's why page speed is a release check in our process, just like testing the form or verifying conversion events. If a page doesn't meet the budget, it doesn't go live.
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